


You're Not From Around Here

by Vehemently



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-05
Updated: 2009-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:26:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is it: A cognitive shift.<br/>Tagline: James does not know how to know that fact.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Not From Around Here

The people in law enforcement who _aren't_ vaguely paranoid are the scary ones. You have to be a narcissist or a sociopath or a thrill-seeker not to get that reflexive twinge: you investigate the world and the world might return the favor someday. James Ellison has turned in his hours listening to RICO wiretaps and loitering in nondescript Fords. He knows his paranoia well.

And so it's not actually difficult for him to notice, a day or so after the terrifying girl knocks him unconscious, that a large gray SUV sometimes trails him to the office. It's intermittent, no better than one day in three, and always in the morning, never the afternoon or on errands on the weekend. Somebody knows James is not a morning person, or else somebody is a nightowl himself, and watches all night long. After a long cold morning of fear, James decides that this surveillance probably did not start till after the last time he talked with his ex-wife. He doesn't have any reason to call her, but the sudden imperative not to has a perverse effect. He finds himself scrolling through his cell phone contacts while he is waiting at stoplights, and hovers over her name for long periods. He has not quite worked himself up to deleting her altogether.

James does not think of himself as a bold man. He gives himself a full week of exactitude, following his routine to the minute and able to predict precisely how traffic will vary, before he decides to act. With the curtains pulled in his living room, he plots the possibilities: there is still a chance that this is someone with a grudge, some ordinary person, or even some other, more secretive federal agency assessing him for recruitment. If he is mistaken on that account he is very likely to be arrested. Then again, killer robots from the future. Killer robots from the future trump everything else.

Killer robots from the future seem to have mixed feelings on him; the one with the actor's face saved his life by destroying the other one with... the other face. James thinks it through, as he unearths some of the more exotic ammunition he used to work with, on a firing range, at the FBI. Stop-shot bullets will do nothing against a creature with no internal organs to damage. If it is a killer robot in that SUV, regular wads and even heavy wads will do very little. He will need to aim for the head, and need some kind of explosive round. The nice thing about having been an FBI agent is the collection of of strange weaponry he has amassed. He already owns a very small number of explosive rounds.

If it is not a killer robot, and he has to fire anyway, he will be blowing some poor fool's head right off. He loads his rounds carefully, so that several ordinary slugs precede the robot-killers in the clip.

James Ellison stands behind his closed front door, the one that's been broken down twice this fall, at seven in the morning. It's crisp, in that Los Angeles winter way. It is too early for the smoggy haze to have settled into lung and basin alike. He is armed, and he is ready. There is no reason to leave it to another day, to let the anxiety accrete any further. He turns his back on the closed door and exits his home through the rear.

The block is quiet, a bit of dew on cars' windshields like heavenly gifts. Even if he had not been watching, James would be able to tell that the gray SUV has not been parked all night. Its windshield is clear, dry; its engine block must be warm. He scrutinizes the driver's seat from a distance. If it is the terrifying girl, he will not try anything.

(Probably, the terrifying girl is a robot. He has come to this conclusion. But to say this is so is to accept that robots are everywhere, omnipresent, enmeshed in the human population.)

It's not the terrifying girl. It's a man, a white man, a familiar white man. It is the man who accompanied Sarah Connor in Mexico. He is reading a comic book and chewing on something. He looks bored.

James considers the angles, and selects an approach that will allow him to be invisible in the rearview mirrors until too late. He moves forward at a trot, tense but with a strong sense of the upper hand. He has not spent time before now contemplating who this man is, what his relationship to Sarah might be. He did not move in her orbit in the way that intimate people do. He is probably not a lover. He touched the boy, though, like a friend or like a teacher.

(He never even looked at the terrifying girl, not once. James considers this detail carefully, and concludes that the man is flesh all the way through.)

He does everything right. Even so, as James pivots to bring his firing hand up, weapon ready, the unnamed man is already aiming at him through the passenger window. The man looks startled, pop-eyes blank, but probably no more startled than James himself. Their arms stretch out straight in opposite directions. They make no move to provoke one another.

"Hey," says the man, and bends his elbow. He slides his weapon away with the casual ease of someone who is never unarmed. His forearm is tattooed, a crude prison blue. It is possible that's where the man was in 1999; the Connors are all too familiar with the criminal justice system. James lowers his weapon and accepts the invitation: he pulls open the passenger door.

"Why are you following me?" he asks. He does not climb into the SUV.

"Get in," says the man.

James remembers watching this man dig up the Mexican desert, bury a steel corpse. James remembers seeing this man's pulse in his unshaved throat, the sweat on his back, the way he glances around a space and locates the boy first before anything.

"Will you hurry the hell up," says the man, exasperated now. "Unless you want your neighbors calling the cops." His voice is level, pitiless, but not in a cruel way. His expressions are remarkably blunt, as if he has never had to lie in his life.

Gingerly, James steps onto the running board, and settles himself into the passenger seat. He does not close the door. He allows himself a few glances into the rear, in case the terrifying girl or some other horror lies in wait for him. But the back seats are empty except for a stray candy wrapper.

James asks, "Why are you following me?"

"Wanted to know where you're going," says the man. He does not explain why he only follows sometimes, and why he hasn't stopped since he discovered that James only ever goes to work (and by the same route) every morning.

"You work for Sarah Connor."

The man settles in his seat; he glances left and right at the sleepy street. "Something like that."

Both his arms are heavily tattooed, in more colors than James had originally noticed. They spiral up under his short sleeves, peek out of his collar. They are interrupted, here and there, with raised scar tissue. The warp of burn scars is obvious, roiling the inked pattern like a broken horizontal hold on a television. The man is muscular, but not in that Southern California way; he is too lean, not top-heavy enough. He is not a bodybuilder but the kind of body that develops through manual labor. He has not spent time in a prison yard, or not any prison yard James would recognize.

"Who are you?" James asks. He can hear the helpless bafflement in his tone.

"Nobody you need to know," says the tattooed man.

(Up close, James can see the lines in his forehead, the texture of his skin. He is just enough younger than Sarah Connor that it seems unlikely he is the boy's father. The boy John was born in 1984, when this man before him was a child -- but John still a boy, when he should be in his twenties. James does not know how to know that fact.)

"Please stop following me. Tell --" and James stumbles over her first name, as if manners mattered now, "-- tell Sarah to stop having me followed."

"She isn't having you followed." The man looks a little surprised at his having said that. James waits and lets him stew for a moment; one confession might be linked to more. Uneasy, the man slings a hand on the steering wheel. "John mentioned something to me. I was just --" He huffs a laugh in the back of his throat, some comedy he does not share with James. "They don't ask where I'm at if they think I'm watching you."

A pause. James gentles his voice as he does with skittish children. "And where are you?"

The man stares through the windshield at something invisible, something far away in his mind. James watches him tighten up under scrutiny, his lips pressing together till they turn white. He cannot hold his silence. "I went to Griffith Park one time," he says, sudden. "Class trip, or something, I don't remember. It was a couple months after a fire, and the trees were still mostly burnt."

(James thinks very hard. He has visited Griffith Park too, when first he came to Los Angeles: driven its rough hills, watched the gawking children in lines at the Observatory. Griffith Park has burned only three times: 1933, 1961, and 2007. James remembers 2007, how they evacuated parts of Los Feliz and the dull grit of charcoal that was in everyone's throat and stinging in the eyes. The smoke seemed never to end. It seemed monstrous to him that the city should go on as usual with an inferno in its midst.)

(In 2007, the man he's sitting next to was only a year younger than he is now. He is certainly not old enough to remember either of the previous fires.)

"It grew back fast," says the tattooed man. He has not noticed the tremor that has begun in James's ribs. The man nods to himself and says, "I like the trees."

"The future," James blurts. He can't help himself. It is the most unreasonable thing in the world.

The man's calm is merciless. "Yeah?" he asks. He does not seem surprised that James has guessed.

They sit side by side in the SUV. It is quiet, early morning. Outside the windows, the air is crisp, the Santa Ana winds long past. Rain will come soon, and relieve the dull anger of Autumn. James appreciates the rain. He breathes in and out, again, and his heart will not slow.

He turns carefully to face this man, this stranger, this emissary from afar. James waits till he has eye-contact, and asks, "Do you know when?"

The man slides his eyes away, back to that something in the distance only he can see. "I don't know. I don't know any more."

"Any more?" It comes out thundering, like a demand.

For the first time, the man smiles. It is an unsettling smile that does not touch his eyes. "Things have changed, since I got here. I don't know how it'll be."

"You'll live through it _twice_?" James hears his voice squawk on that last word.

The man purses his lips. He does not look at James. "Second time through, at least I'll know what I'm doing."

James's foot is on the running board. He steps down into the street, tar warming in the morning sun. He does not say another word to the man in the SUV; he does not have another word in his mind right now. James breathes out through his nose so that he won't throw up.

Behind him, he hears the engine flare to life. Gears. The ordinary LA rumble of a car driving away. James leans over with his hands on his knees, or the one open hand. He has forgotten all this time the weapon in his other hand. It leaves traces of gun oil on his trouser pleat. He is alone on the street just beginning to show signs of ordinary life, the newspapers beginning to disappear from front stoops into houses. It is a Thursday like any other.

James goes inside and calls in sick to work and spends the day lying down with a cold washcloth over his eyes. He doesn't see the gray SUV on his street again.

Five months later, that emissary from another world lies dead on the floor of Catherine Weaver's pristine kitchen. James sees the photographs, of course. The police are very interested. James cannot supply a motive, or a suspect. It was instantaneous, in and out and the leaden wad embedded in the far wall, flecked red. Just turn the corner unknowing and walk into death, God's terrifying mercy. James can say safely, and with a certain dark relief, that the man will not see the world end a second time.


End file.
